The State of Cloud Standards

The Open Data Center Alliance will moderate a practical session on the state of cloud standards. With adoption rates soaring, the time is right for industry bodies to clarify and unify their standards and for end-users to understand their importance.

The presentation will focus on what users want from the cloud and how standards organizations can help resolve complications including:
-Regulation and jurisdiction
-Security and compliance
-Vendor lock-in
-User involvement

We’re all accustomed to transferring money from one bank account to another; a credit to the payer becomes a debit to the payee. But that model uses a specific set of sophisticated techniques to accomplish what appears to be a simple transaction. We’re also aware of how today we can order goods online, or reserve an airline seat over the Internet. Or even simpler, we can update a photograph on Facebook. Can these applications use the same models, or are new techniques required?

In this webcast, we’ll explore concepts like consistency, idempotency, 2 phase commit, and systems built on ACID databases stored on CRUD storage; and why in the age of distributed systems, we need to update our thinking to include eventual consistency, understand new theories such as the CAP Theorem and RESTfulness, and undertake transactional work in the face of unreliable and physically dispersed systems. We’ll then explain how all this can be accomplished with new application techniques built on modern storage systems.

And yes, we’ll explain all the acronyms and nomenclature too.

You will learn:

•A brief history of transactional systems from banking to Facebook
•How the Internet and distributed systems have changed and how we view transactions
•An explanation of the terminology, from ACID to CAP and beyond
•How applications, networks & particularly storage have changed to meet these demands

Ten years ago, the SNIA 100-Year Archive Task Force developed a survey with the following goal:

To determine the requirements for long-term digital information retention in the data center. These requirements are needed to frame the definition of best practices and solutions to the retention and preservation problems unique to large, scalable data centers. The new survey (2017) was developed to assess the following details:

1. Who needs to retain long term information
2. What information needs to be retained and for
3. If organizations are able to meet their retention needs
4. How long term information is stored, secured and preserved

Storage can be something of a “black box,” a monolithic entity that is at once mysterious and scary. That’s why we created “The Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud to Ask” webcast series. So far, we’ve explored various and sundry aspects of storage, focusing on “the naming of the parts.” Our goal has been to break down some of the components of storage and explain how they fit into the greater whole.

This time, however, we’re going to open up Pandora’s Box and peer inside the world of storage management, uncovering some of the key technologies that are used to manage devices, storage traffic, and storage architectures. In particular, we’ll be discussing:

There’s so much to say on each of these subjects we could do a full webcast on any one of them, but for a quick overview of many of the technologies that affect storage in one place, we think you will find your time has been well spent.

Join us on September 28th, 2017, for our continuation of the “Too Proud To Ask” series with Cyan, the Storage Management Pod.

The use of cloud object storage is ramping up sharply, especially in the public cloud, to reduce capital budgets and operating expenses. However, enterprises are challenged with legacy applications that do not support standard protocols to move data to and from the cloud.

Enterprises have developed strategies specific to the public cloud for Data Protection, Archive, Application development, DevOps, Big Data Analytics and Cognitive Artificial Intelligence. However, these same organizations have legacy applications and infrastructure that are not cloud friendly.

Object storage is a secure, simple, scalable, and cost-effective means of managing the explosive growth of unstructured data enterprises generate every day. Gateways enable SMB and NFS data transfers to be converted to Amazon’s S3 protocol while optimizing data with deduplication and providing QoS efficiency on the data path to the cloud.

This webcast will highlight the market trends toward the adoption of object storage and the use of gateways to execute a cloud strategy, the benefits of object storage when gateways are deployed, and the use cases that are best suited to leverage this solution.

Join this webcast to learn:
•The benefits of object storage when gateways are deployed
•Primary use cases for using object storage and gateways in private, public or hybrid cloud
•How gateways can help achieve the goals of your cloud strategy without
retooling your on-premise infrastructure and applications

Come hear about what Real World Storage Workloads are and why they are so important to Datacenter server performance.
See SNIA SSSI Reference IO Captures on Testmyworkload.com that are being used to develop new SNIA Technical Specifications.
After an overview of RWSWs and their key metrics, see an analysis of a 2,000 Outlet Retail Web Portal 24-Hr SQL Server workload.
The same SQL Server workload is then used to test four Datacenter SSDs and a SAS HDD.

In this, the seventh entry in the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series we look into the mysticism and magic of what happens when you send your data off into the wilderness. Once you click “save,” for example, where does it actually go?

When we start to dig deeper beyond the application layer, we often don’t understand what happens behind the scenes. It’s important to understand multiple aspects of the type of storage our data goes to along with their associated benefits and drawbacks as well as some of the protocols used to transport it.

Many people get nervous when they see that many acronyms, but all too often they come up in conversation, and you’re expected to know all of them? Worse, you’re expected to know the differences between them, and the consequences of using them? Even worse, you’re expected to know what happens when you use the wrong one?

We’re here to help.

It’s an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes.

Please join us on August 1st for another edition of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, as we work towards making you feel more comfortable in the strange, mystical world of storage.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=643

Containers can make it easier for developers to know that their software will run, no matter where it is deployed. This webcast, presented by the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative and the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, will discuss how persistent memory is a revolutionary technology, which will boost the performance of next-generation packaging of applications and libraries into containers.

You’ll learn:
•What SNIA is doing to advance persistent memory
•What the ecosystem enablement efforts are around persistent memory solutions
•How NVDIMMs are paving the way for plug-n-play adoption into containers environments

Join SNIA experts, Arthur Sainio, SNIA NVDIMM SIG Co-chair, Chad Thibodeau, SNIA Cloud Storage member and Alex McDonald Co-chair of SNIA Solid State Storage and SNIA Cloud Storage Initiatives to find out what customers, storage developers, and the industry want to see to fully unlock the potential of persistent memory in a container environment.

Standards organizations like SNIA are in the vanguard of describing cloud concepts and usage, and (as you might expect) are leading on how and where security fits in this new world of dispersed and publicly stored and managed data. In this webcast, SNIA experts Eric Hibbard and Mark Carlson will take us through a discussion of existing cloud and emerging technologies (such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Analytics & Big Data, and so on) – and explain how we’re describing and solving the significant security concerns these technologies are creating. They will discuss emerging ISO/IEC standards, SLA frameworks and security and privacy certifications. This webcast will be of interest to managers and acquirers of cloud storage (whether internal or external), and developers of private and public cloud solutions who want to know more about security and privacy in the cloud.

In this, the sixth entry in the “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask,” popular webcast series we look into some of the nitties and the gritties of storage details that are often assumed.

When looking at data from the lens of an application, host, or operating system, it’s easy to forget that there are several layers of abstraction underneath before the actual placement of data occurs. In this webcast we are going to scratch beyond the first layer to understand some of the basic taxonomies of these layers.

It’s an ambitious project, but these terms and concepts are at the heart of where compute, networking and storage intersect. Having a good grasp of these concepts ties in with which type of storage networking to use, and how data is actually stored behind the scenes.

Join us on July 6th for this session. We look forward to seeing you there!

The SNIA’s Scalable Storage Management Technical Work Group (SSM TWG) has created and published an open industry standard specification for storage management that defines a customer centric interface for the purpose of managing storage and related data services. This specification builds on the DMTF’s Redfish specification using RESTful methods and JSON formatting. This presentation provides an overview of basic Swordfish and Redfish concepts and shows how Swordfish extends Redfish. Examples showing how clients can traverse the models, highlighting how the two standards integrate seamlessly together, are given.

Are there basic storage terms you should understand, but maybe you don’t?

Then welcome to this webcast series, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Storage, but were too Proud to Ask” where we’re going to take an irreverent, yet still informative look, at the parts of a storage solution in Data Center architectures. We’ll start with the very basics – The Naming of the Parts. We’ll break down the entire storage picture and identify the places where most of the confusion falls. Join us in this first webcast – Part Chartreuse – where we’ll cover:

•What an initiator is
•What a target is
•What a storage controller is
•What a RAID is, and what a RAID controller is
•What a Volume Manager is
•What a Storage Stack is

Oh, and why is this series named after colors, instead of numbers? Because there is no order - each is a standalone seminar. So don’t let pride get in your way.

As part of the successful “Everything You Wanted To Know About Storage But Were Too Proud To Ask” series, we’ve discussed numerous topics about storage devices, protocols, and networks. As we examine some of these topics further, we begin to tease out some subtle nuances; subtle, yet important nevertheless.

In Part Sepia, we’re going to take a look at some of the terms and concepts that affect Storage Architectures as a whole. In particular, we’ll be looking at those aspects that can help or hinder storage systems inside the network:

Each of these topics has a profound impact on storage designs and performance, but they are often misunderstood. We’re going to help you become clear on all of these very important storage concepts so that you can grok storage just a little bit more.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog at http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=629

Modern storage systems offer a dizzying range of IOPS (from hundreds to millions), as well as different latencies and storage capacities. Many IT managers find it difficult to determine which SSD or flash array to buy for their needs, or even whether they can get the speed they need from standard HDDs. This webcast will present results from a 2012 and follow-up 2016 survey of IT professionals to understand performance, capacity, and cost requirements, including IOPS, storage capacity, and latency, of various applications.

The growing popularity of object-based storage has resulted in the development of Ethernet-connected storage devices, herein referred to as IP-Based Drives and subsystems supporting object interfaces and in some cases the ability to run localized applications.
Typical scale-out storage nodes consist of relatively inexpensive enclosures with IP network connectivity, CPU, Memory and Direct Attached Storage (DAS). While inexpensive to deploy, these solutions become harder to manage over time.
To ease management of these drives, SNIA has approved the release of the IP-Based Drive Management Specification. In this webcast, you’ll hear from authors of the specification who’ll discuss:

• Major Components of the IP Based Drive Management Standard
• How the standard leverages the DMTF Redfish management standard to manage Kinetic and other IP-Based Drives
• Providing a standard management interface for drives that are part of JBOD or JBOF enclosures

New solid state storage technologies are forcing the industry to refine distinctions between networks and other types of system interconnects. The question on everyone’s mind is, when is it beneficial to use networks to access solid state storage, particularly persistent memory? The answer to this question involves application, interconnect, memory technology and scalability factors that can be analyzed in the context of a latency budget. In this talk we will explore latency budgets for various types of solid state storage access. These can be used to determine which combinations of interconnects, technologies and scales are compatible with Load/Store instruction access and which are better suited to IO completion techniques such as polling or blocking. In this webcast you’ll learn:

•Why latency is important in accessing solid state storage
•How to determine the appropriate use of networking in the context of a latency budget
•Do’s and don’ts for Load/Store access

Server Message Block (SMB) is the core file-transfer protocol of Windows, MacOS and Samba, and has become widely deployed. It’s ubiquitous - a 30-year-old family of network code.

However, the latest iteration of SMB3 is almost unrecognizable when compared to versions only a few years old. Extensive reengineering has led to advanced capabilities that include multichannel, transparent failover, scale out, and encryption. SMB Direct makes use of RDMA networking, creates block transport system and provides reliable transport to zetabytes of unstructured data, worldwide.

SMB3 forms the basis of hyper-converged and scale-out systems for virtualization and SQL Server. It is available for a variety of hardware devices, from printers, network-attached storage appliances, to Storage Area Networks (SANs). It is often the most prevalent protocol on a network, with high-performance data transfers as well as efficient end-user access over wide-area connections.

In this SNIA-ESF Webcast, Microsoft’s Ned Pyle, program manager of the SMB protocol, will discuss the current state of SMB, including:

Converged Infrastructure (CI), Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) along with Cluster or Cloud In Box (CIB) are popular trend topics that have gained both industry and customer adoption. As part of data infrastructures, CI, CIB and HCI enable simplified deployment of resources (servers, storage, I/O networking, hardware, software) across different environments. However, what do these approaches mean for a hyperconverged storage environment? What are the key concerns and considerations related specifically to storage? Most importantly, how do you know that you’re asking the right questions in order to get to the right answers?

Find out in this live SNIA-ESF webcast where expert Greg Schulz, founder and analyst of Server StorageIO, will move beyond the hype to discuss:

One of the most used technologies in Data Centers today is the storage protocol iSCSI. With the increasing speeds for Ethernet, the technology is more and more appealing because of its relative low cost to implement. However, like any other Storage Technology, there is more here than meets the eye.

In this webcast, we will be focusing entirely on iSCSI. We’ll start by covering the basic elements that will make your life easier if you are considering using iSCSI in your architecture. In particular we will be talking about:

•iSCSI Definition
•iSCSI offload
•Host-based iSCSI
•TCP offload

Like nearly everything else in storage, there is more here than just a protocol. If you are interested in making the most of your iSCSI solution, this webcast is for you.

After the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=608

The demand for digital data preservation has increased drastically in recent years. Maintaining a large amount of data for long periods of time (months, years, decades, or even forever) becomes even more important given government regulations such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, OSHA, and many others that define specific preservation periods for critical records.

While the move from paper to digital information over the past decades has greatly improved information access, it complicates information preservation. This is due to many factors including digital format changes, media obsolescence, media failure, and loss of contextual metadata. The Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) was created by SNIA to facilitate long-term data storage and preservation. SIRF can be used with disk, tape, and cloud based storage containers, and is extensible to any new storage technologies. It provides an effective and efficient way to preserve and secure digital information for many decades, even with the ever-changing technology landscape. Join this webcast to learn:
•Key challenges of long-term data retention
•How the SIRF format works and its key elements
•How SIRF supports different storage containers - disks, tapes, CDMI and the cloud
•Availability of Open SIRF

SNIA experts that developed the SIRF standard will be on hand to answer your questions.

Buffers, Queues, and Caches, oh my! Buffers and Queues are part of every data center architecture, and a critical part of performance – both in improving it as well as hindering it. A well-implemented buffer can mean the difference between a finely run system and a confusing nightmare of troubleshooting. Knowing how buffers and queues work in storage can help make your storage system shine.

However, there is something of a mystique surrounding these different data center components, as many people don’t realize just how they’re used and why. In this pod of the “Too Proud To Ask” series, we’re going to be demystifying this very important aspect of data center storage. You’ll learn:

•What are buffers, caches, and queues, and why you should care about the differences?
•What’s the difference between a read cache and a write cache?
•What does “queue depth” mean?
•What’s a buffer, a ring buffer, and host memory buffer, and why does it matter?
•What happens when things go wrong?

These are just some of the topics we’ll be covering, and while it won’t be exhaustive look at buffers, caches and queues, you can be sure that you’ll get insight into this very important, and yet often overlooked, part of storage design.

After you watch the webcast, check out the Q&A blog http://sniaesfblog.org/?p=615

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a non-profit organization made up of member companies spanning information technology. A globally recognized and trusted authority, SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement and security of information.